No Walls in This Berlin

Open to anything and closed to no one, Richard Stein’s cafe made the skittish wince.

Sexually eclectic and politically charged, it was in the vanguard of a queer power movement in the 1990s, a place where homosexuals, cross-dressers, AIDS activists, lesbians, immigrants and some who preferred to just remain mysterious pushed for wider civil rights in a newly unified city wholly free after four decades of communism.

The Cafe Anal is gone, except for some postcards and brochures, those things kept in a box and pulled out every now and then, a reminder that your idealism amounted to something. Stein gets that wistful look when he talks about the cafe and how Berlin, with a curious legacy of tolerance and repression, is these days marketing itself as Europe’s gay capital.

“We tried to provoke back then,” he said, sitting in his new restaurant, where pies spin on glass carousels. “Of course with a name like Anal it was a tough beginning.”

Berlin is a gay tourist’s ideal stop: The city has a gay mayor, a gay-lesbian museum, a prestigious award for gay films and literary sketches left behind like signposts from the likes of Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. With an estimated 320,000 gay residents in a population of 3.4 million, Berlin is edgy and progressive, instigating the nation’s gay marriage law several years ago and fronting TV commercials in which gay couples advertise spinach and soup.

But with this libertine atmosphere has come a sense of political complacency -- a belief that the AIDS scourge of the 1980s and ‘90s has receded. Unprotected sex in “bareback parties” has multiplied in recent years. The city is a grid of dual marketing to gays -- the official one for culture, architecture, music and history and the unofficial one of Internet postings for sex gatherings that draw people from across Europe and the United States.

“The city started marketing its homosexual history about five years ago because they discovered a target group of double-income with no kids,” said Karl-Heinz Steinle, a curator at the gay museum. “They took the reality -- Berlin is open and progressive -- and they marketed it, but they can’t show everything because some things are underground and can’t be marketed.”

Novelist Michael Sollorz grew up in the East, writing leaflets for gay rights and secretly copying them in a church basement. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he discovered a gay community in the West rallying against discrimination and demanding political influence and better AIDS treatment. His book “Abel and Joe” is the tale of a man searching East and West for his lost lover in a time of new freedom.

“I lived in invisibility in one country and entered another that organized a gay film festival and a Christopher Street party,” said Sollorz, a compact man who mulls his words before he speaks. “You can live well as a gay man in certain boroughs of Berlin. Facts have been created and equalities won that even the most right-wing extremists can’t deny.”

The city’s gay museum is off a courtyard in a brick building that housed ceramic and carpentry shops in the days when Berlin hummed with small factories. Inside, the epochs of gay life unfold: There are depictions of a naked Achilles and a satyr from early Athens, lithographs of homosexuals burned at the stake in 18th century Prussia, erotic sepia-toned photographs from the early 1900s and images from the Nazi era with the sinister spread of brown shirts and swastikas in an unsuspecting city.

“First it was ancient Greece, then Capri, and then Berlin became the paradise for homosexual love,” said Steinle, standing near a painting of muscular men bathing in a blue sea.

In 1919, social scientist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science here and campaigned for sexual rights. The gay community in Berlin mirrored the wider freedom and promiscuity of the jazz age in the 1920s and was further spurred by a leftist-inspired “free body culture” that celebrated nudity -- a concept still embraced by Germans, many of whom sunbathe in the buff.

“The free body culture philosophy led to a new kind of erotic movement. But the Nazis eventually co-opted it. They institutionalized it and stripped away the erotic and pressed the body into the service of the state,” Steinle said. “Berlin had 100 gay and lesbian bars in the 1930s, and one by one the Nazis closed them.”

About 10,000 homosexuals are believed to have died in concentration camps. Nearly 50,000 others were convicted under Nazi sex offense laws that carried penalties of up to 10 years hard labor. West Germany didn’t reform the Hitler-era laws until 1969, although they were rarely enforced once a gay community reemerged, opening clubs in the war ruins of 1945.

The German Parliament has agreed to provide about $600,000 to build a Holocaust memorial for gays. But a new group, Queer Nations, is urging that the state instead fund a scientific center on sexual studies in the spirit of Hirschfeld’s institute.

Roland Mueller was born after the Third Reich, but he recalls the winter when communism fell and men from the East arrived at his gay bookstore in West Berlin, Prinz Eisenherz.

“They came in waves,” said Mueller, the shop’s manager. “I couldn’t believe it. Books were always a problem in the East, but this was the first time many of them had seen gay literature. It’s no joke, they had tears in their eyes at the betrayal they had lived under.”

Today, the Social Democrats and the Greens who supported gay causes in recent years are less influential. The new coalition government is headed by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, which draws support from heavily Roman Catholic Bavaria. The gay community doesn’t expect a rollback of rights, but Mueller and others don’t foresee homosexual issues appearing on the agenda either.

Prinz Eisenherz was quiet on a recent morning. Mueller poured coffee and tended to customers perusing novels that these days are more graphic, yet less shocking than the coded literature of decades past. Slick with taut, rippled men, the gift calendars seemed as if long-ago Olympians, though with better haircuts, had somehow wandered across the lens of Robert Mapplethorpe. Two men entered, bringing the winter air with them.

“For young people today, a gay bookstore or coffee shop is not important for their identity. To me that’s a sign of emancipation, of progress,” Mueller said. “But it only took six months in the 1930s for it to all vanish. We need to be vigilant about what happened in the past. But I’m not frightened.”

Vigilance may not always spring to mind in a city that is host to the “biggest leather meeting in Europe.”

Hanns P. Nerger, president of the Berlin Tourism Marketing Corp., is happy about Berlin’s niche in the gay scene. An evenly tanned man with a drawer full of fact sheets and a staff that whirls around him, Nerger understands the subtleties and nuance of promotion.

Berlin has long been “a gay city, an open liberal city,” Nerger said. “We only received one negative e-mail when we started gay marketing in 1998. It’s been absolutely positive.” He drops his voice a bit: “But, you know, the image of Berlin is totally separate from the image of Germany. We’re much more cosmopolitan.”

Statistics not found in tourist brochures, however, are unsettling, such as those of HIV/AIDS cases. With better treatment and activism, the number of cases in Germany was 37,000 in 2000, but in the last five years, infections increased 30%, raising the number to 49,000.

The leather meeting, known as the annual sadomasochist fetish party, troubled conservatives and in September led to what Nerger described as a “big discussion.”

Some Christian Democrat politicians complained as men brandishing chains, masks, whips and other curious paraphernalia paraded through town. But most of the media and the public was blase about the handcuffs and open-backed pants.

“That too is Berlin,” Klaus Wowereit, the city’s gay mayor, said in defense of the leather party, modeled after the Folsom Street festival in San Francisco. “And as long as nothing illegal happens, I expect tolerance.”

That’s the way West Berlin seemed 25 years ago, when Richard Stein left his home outside Cologne and traveled through Cold War geography to a new city.

“You come from a little village and you go into a leather bar in Berlin and you think, ‘This is not my world,’ ” said Stein, sitting on a snowy night in his restaurant, the Bread of Mercy Service Station.

Stein smiles, stroking his long beard, cupping it the way a funnel strains water. His silver loop earring shimmies. He’s still the mischievous guy who founded Cafe Anal. Wearing eggshell vestments and holding a crucifix, he recently posed as the pope on a postcard. The restaurant murmurs with voices. Tiny sequined disco balls spin lazily overheard. A set of bullhorns is nailed to the wall. Soup, bread and Polish beer slide across tables and newspapers crinkle by the windows. Lovers kiss.

Despite his new place, Stein likes to talk about his old cafe, which closed in 2000. “I wanted a different type of place” back then, he says. “Some friends and I opened the Cafe Anal in Kreuzberg, the first West Berlin bar to sell East German beer.... The queer scene was connected to the leftist political energy. You had AIDS activism, minority rights, gays and lesbians coming together. Berlin seemed a special island.”

The Bread of Mercy Service Station is the kind of haunt a man who managed a “queer power” venue eases into over time: a quiet space on a corner with reliable barkeeps and regular locals.

“I remember,” he says, “a few years after the wall fell the political movement was exhausted. It worked. Things were gotten.” He lights that cigarette he’s been resisting for 35 minutes.

He looks around. The bar is busy; the tables full. Some faces are too young to know the history Stein knows, others have gray stubble and thin lines around the eyes. Forks clatter and coats are hung near the door, where every now and then, a whoosh of cold air rolls in, hanging for a moment and then disappearing near the heat of the kitchen.